SHOT, together with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), works to support haemovigilance reporting in the UK.
SHOT's statistical data has been used to decrease bacterial infections through better skin cleansing procedures and the incidence of life-threatening transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI) in the UK, by discouraging the use of fresh frozen plasma from female donors.
[1] The cause of TRALI is not fully understood, and may have more than one mechanism,[2] but most cases are associated with transfusion of plasma or other blood products that contain some antibodies that the donor developed during pregnancy.
[4] The collected information has also provided evidence to support the pre-existing practice of leukodepletion (depleting the number of leukocytes, or white blood cells, from the product) to reduce the risk of transfusion-associated graft-versus-host disease and post-transfusion purpura in immunocompromised patients.
For example, SHOT's data demonstrated that increasing the use of wristbands for patient identification and portable, bedside barcode readers reduced the risk of an error caused by human factors.